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Talk:The Scarlet Band
I read this one in A&OP in three sittings at the Barnes and Noble cafe. I have to say that the "mystery" should not have required a Holmes analog to solve. Even after deliberately forgetting the spoilers I'd picked up from here (which I managed to do surprisingly well, if I do say so myself) I saw the solution coming from a mile away. I mean, that was a really transparent conspiracy, even without any evidence (and notice none was featured). I guess if you were antipathetic toward the HUD you might possibly be relied upon to see what you wanted to see, but if they were going to bring in an objective observer, they should have done a lot more obfuscation than they had. Apparently Atlantean law enforcement is even worse than the Atlantean military. There they just give command to the person who is least qualified, and thus least likely to succeed, and hope they'll beat the odds. The law enforcement is so careful to keep competent people from joining up to begin with that there's not even anyone who realizes how much they don't know. Turtle Fan 23:05, January 5, 2011 (UTC) :Mystery just isn't HT's strong suit. He seems to model his plot structure on "Encyclopedia Brown", i.e., an odd bit of random trivia solves the whole thing. Sometimes this works ok, e.g. "Farmers' Law", where the detective is a priest in a time and place where investigation as we know it is embryonic at best--of course it would come down to who could approach the victim with a blunt instrument without suspcicion. :Other times, like this, it seems forced. ::An apt analogy. I'm no mystery buff so I'm not one to complain. Whenever I read a mystery story it's invariably because something else about it appeals to me, as the Atlantean setting does in this case. Turtle Fan 21:40, January 6, 2011 (UTC) :As I think about it, the best mystery (insofar as I had no idea who was responsible) was the "Who Killed Tom Kennedy?" thread in Breakthroughs. ::Using the same criteria, the attack on the Colonization Fleet was played remarkably well. That one really had me going around in circles. We gradually saw evidence implicating the US (at least circumstantially) but this is coming in the face of our prejudices: We all assumed it was the Nazis, and even if not, the US was a very distant third, for the readers as well as the Lizards. The little bits and pieces of evidence to the contrary built up so slowly that we had time to assimilate them into this worldview before something more damning came along. ::The Kennedy murder, on the other hand, while it was skillfully built up by HT's standards, included every bit of suspicion-casting evidence being a red herring. The thing is solved when someone whom no one had suspected came out of nowhere and said "Yeah, it was me" without a shred of evidence leading to him. Turtle Fan 21:40, January 6, 2011 (UTC) :As an aside, it's worth remembering that contemporary police forces in the US weren't exactly crackerjack. There was a great deal of corruption and incompetence, so a mid-to-late 19th Century police force bungling a conspiracy and operating purely on prejudices and gut-instinct didn't set off alarm bells at the time. It didn't translate into a compelling mystery, although it did give us some insight into the society, so from the perspective, it did its job. ::I suppose. I was more surprised that the Watson analog was so clueless. He disliked HUD quite a lot, but on the other hand he kept sneering at the Atlanteans as the UK's inferiors, and even within the UK viewed Scotland Yard as shit next to his friend, so you'd think his prejudices would have cancelled each other out. Turtle Fan 21:40, January 6, 2011 (UTC) :Tragically, we may never know what if anything came of the HUD's new "immunity". TR 17:23, January 6, 2011 (UTC) ::Cheer up. Just because the Atlantean police don't know how to fabricate evidence doesn't mean we can't fabricate Evidence! to our hearts' content. Turtle Fan 21:40, January 6, 2011 (UTC)